Last July an American woman working at a rural health clinic in the southern Chinese city of Kunming hit on Internet gold when she posted pictures to her blog of a counterfeit Apple store in the city that had been faked almost perfectly, down to the blue shirts of the employees and the winding staircase.

The blogger, Jessica Angelson, who has since moved to New York to attend nursing school at Columbia University, once again found her discovery in the national spotlight on Tuesday when GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney mentioned the fake store in a town hall debate with President Barack Obama.

“There’s even an Apple store in China that’s a counterfeit Apple store, selling counterfeit goods,” Mr. Romney said in response to a question about the outsourcing of American jobs, according to the transcript debate. “They hack into our computers. We will have to have people play on a fair basis, that’s number one.”

Many bloggers might be flattered to discover their work being discussed by a man in the running to occupy the Oval Office. But in a phone interview with China Real Time after the debate, Ms. Angelson said she didn’t feel her find was being used properly. “[Mitt Romney] uses it as a short hand to generate outrage about trade practices in China and as a short hand that he will be quote unquote ‘tough on China.’ It’s a somewhat meaningless shorthand. I’m not entirely sure he knows what he’s referring to at this point,” she said.

It turns out the Republican nominee, who has noticeably cranked up his anti-China rhetoric of late, really doesn’t know what he’s referring to – at least not entirely. Although the store he was likely referring to is not an authorized reseller of Apple products, it nonetheless sells authentic Apple products — one of the myriad stores around China that sell Apple products either smuggled into the country or obtained through unofficial channels.

BirdAbroad

An image of the fake Apple store in Kunming, in southwestern China’s Yunnan Province, that went viral in 2011 after Jessica Angelson wrote about it on her blog.

There are certainly counterfeit Apple products floating around China, but for the most part Chinese consumers are savvy enough to know whether they’re buying a real iPhone or a fake one. Those who buy the fake ones often can’t afford the real deal, and are simply trying to broadcast that they belong to the class that own legitimate Apple products.

A salesman from the Kunming store interviewed by China Real Time last year said on Wednesday that the store was still open, and that there were “no problems” with its operations. Apple declined to comment.

For her part, Ms. Angelson said she understood why the post went viral at the time, and indeed has had staying power: “At the time it seemed to fall at this perfect intersection of American’s enormous affection for Apple as a company and their enormous dislike of China as a country. And this was the perfect little set of photos to demonstrate that feeling.”

She said that while a lot of the American response to the story of the store was predictable, she was surprised at the complexity of the Chinese response to the blog post: Some Chinese readers who contacted her over email called for her to apologize to the city of Kunming and the Chinese people or didn’t believe the store could possibly be a fake. Others pointed out that Apple products were made in China and shouldn’t be sold at a mark up in the country, while still others blamed the Chinese government for putting tariffs on Apple products in the first place.

Ms. Angelson is also quick to point out that photos of other knock-off Apple stores came to her from across the world, and that even a fake Apple store in Queens, New York, was shut down after she posted a photo of it online.

“It is more of a global issue, but it doesn’t create as nice a story as China ripping off Apple stores,” she said.

Although Ms. Angelson’s small place in the annals of U.S. presidential debate history is assured, she said for the most part all the attention her blog garnered hadn’t helped her too much.

“There were people who assumed I was a tech blogger. Unfortunately I’m not. If I were, this would have made my career….and unfortunately from that perspective I was working in public health and working in a rural maternity clinic, I was working in HIV prevention and those were the things that interest me and so I continue to write about those things,” she said.

Ultimately she said the experience taught her there needs to be much better understanding in the U.S. about China.

“For all that is written in the news about China in the U.S. everyday, very little is understood… there’s a lot more to be seen and heard, [for people in the U.S.] to be more sophisticated about that country,” she said.